Women Should Be Silent
This is sermon #6 of 6 in my series on women leaders in the Gospels & the early church. For this final sermon in the series, I wanted to tackle the scriptures most often used to keep women in subordinate positions within church leadership. Thanks for following along! This has been a really fun sermon series to research and write, and it was well received by the congregation.
--Rev. Stephanie Spitzer-Hanks, 2nd Sunday after Pentecost 2026, Homer Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, Homer, New York
Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash
1 Corinthians 14:34-35
Women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak but should be subordinate, as the law also says. If there is something they want to learn, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.
1 Timothy 2:11-12
Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.
Sermon Transcript
How did it feel, hearing those two passages that Sam just read?
“Women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak but should be subordinate, as the law also says. If there is something they want to learn, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.”
And “Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.”
Those passages take me back to my childhood and adolescence, and they feel like a punch to the gut. I grew up in a Southern Baptist Church in a small town in East Texas, where passages like these were taken as a rule that we must follow. We had no women who were deacons, and we certainly had no women who were pastors. The only time a woman could stand up and take the microphone in church on Sunday morning was if she were singing a solo.
Otherwise, you could find plenty of women in the pews, in the kitchen preparing food, leading women’s groups, teaching in children’s Sunday school classrooms—but never in adult ones. If there were adult men learning, then it must be men who were teaching.
It is different now, somewhat, in the church where I grew up. Some of the rules have been relaxed a little. But it is still a far cry from, say, this church—here at Homer Congregational Church, all of our deacons are women, your previous pastor was a woman, as is your current preacher. Who will be next? Well, we still don’t know, but I believe there would be no objection to another woman as pastor.
So, who has it right? The church I grew up in, which is like many, many congregations all over the country and the world, or this church, and others like it? Should women be silent? After all, that is what the text says, we all heard it. It’s there in black and white.
The other churches would say that we are ignoring the scriptural mandate. It’s clear!, they would say. Women are not to teach or have authority over a man in church. Period.
But is it that *we* are ignoring what the Bible says, or is it those other churches who are ignoring the Bible?
I have spent the past five weeks that I have been in the pulpit on a series of sermons about women leaders in the Gospels and in the early church. We learned about Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna, who were disciples of Jesus and financial supporters of his ministry. And Mary Magdalene was the apostle to the apostles—chosen and sent by the risen Jesus to bear the message back to the other disciples that he had overcome death.
And in the book of Acts and in Paul’s letters to the churches spread throughout the Roman Empire, we met several women who were co-workers with Paul and house church leaders in the earliest days of the church: Lydia, Priscilla, Chloe, Mary the mother of John Mark, Apphia, Nympha, Euodia, and Syntyche, among others.
We learned that Priscilla, along with her husband Aquila, instructed another minister (note: a *male* minister!) named Apollos. He only knew part of the message of Christ, so Priscilla and Aquila taught him the rest.
We met Phoebe, a deacon or minister in her church, who was a church leader in her city, sharing her wealth with them and with Paul as well.
We rediscovered Junia, whose name was obscured in the biblical text for centuries because biblical scholars simply could not believe that Paul would refer to a woman as “prominent among the apostles.”
One thing I can say for the Baptist tradition that raised me, they did teach me to read the Bible. But, I don’t know, maybe they taught me a little too well? Because I when I read my Bible I find plenty to contradict these two pairs of verses.
So, after hearing about all that these women did,—I’ll ask again: who is it that is ignoring the biblical text? Is it me, who sourced these women’s stories from multiple verses, in multiple chapters, in eight different books in the New Testament? Or is it the folks who want to choose 2 pairs of verses from 2 books, and make those prescriptive for every church, everywhere?
What are we to do, then, with these passages? Do we just ignore them, and assume, based on the weight of evidence found elsewhere in the New Testament, that these statements are one-offs, written for a specific problem in a specific church (or two) during the early days of the church? And that they are not meant to apply to every church, everywhere?
Yes. Yes, we could do that. It is a legitimate approach to interpreting the scriptures. When confronted with a confounding passage, it is always a good idea to stack it up against what we hear God saying across the whole of scripture, and ask: does this seem to fit? Or is this an outlier that we can pay less attention to?
We can also ask: Is there some cultural or historical context I’m missing here that would make this make more sense? Sometimes the answer is to be found in the surrounding verses. It is always a good idea to go ahead and read the whole section or chapter, instead of just one or two verses taken out of context.
Sometimes the context we need is found in the cultural or historical setting of the book where the scripture is found. In a study Bible, this information can often be found in the introduction to the book.
And sometimes you need your nerdy preacher to go digging around to see what various biblical scholars have to say about a passage in order to make any sense of it. That’s what I’m here for!
Let’s look first at the passage from 1 Corinthians:
Paul writes that “Women are to keep silent in churches.” I mean—like, how is that even going to work? Of course we are going to speak in church. Even if we are not speaking from the pulpit, I bet all of the women in here have said *something* since they arrrived this morning.
And this prohibition on speech makes even less sense if you flip back just three chapters in this same letter to the church in Corinth, where Paul gives very particular instructions about how women should present themselves *when they are praying and prophesying in church.* So, why would he give directions about *how* women should pray or prophesy in church, if he meant for us to understand here that women should not be praying or prophesying at all, but should instead be completely silent.
So what could he mean? Well, one of Paul’s reasons for writing to this church in Corinth was that they were getting a reputation as a rowdy bunch. Folks were talking over one another during worship, having noisy side conversations, and generally making it impossible for anyone to be able to hear what was being said. As you can imagine, it was a big problem!
In this letter Paul tells multiple groups of people to keep it down during their time of worship—it’s not just women who need to be quiet so others can hear: he also tells people who are speaking in tongues and people who are prophesying to be quieter and more orderly about it.
It’s also possible that the women in Corinth just were not used to having this much freedom and they let it go to their heads a little bit. Have you ever known (or maybe you yourself have been?) a teenager whose parents were a little overprotective and controlling, so when that teenager finally moved out they took their newfound freedom a little too far? They went a little wild, because now they could?
Well, maybe it was like that for the women in Corinth. They weren’t used to being able to speak up and express themselves in a public place, so maybe when they got their chance, they didn’t quite know how to handle themselves? It’s possible.
This theory also might help explain the part about how “if there is something [the women] want to learn, let them ask their husbands at home.” Women had far less education than men in that time and place, so maybe Paul is saying,“Hey, instead of shouting out your questions, or having loud side conversations during worship, maybe you could save your questions and ask them of your husband (who almost certainly has a higher level of education, and could probably explain things in a calm and quiet manner) at home?”
Then the message is not “don’t ever use your voice to participate in worship.” But it’s “just do it in an orderly manner that allows everyone to hear.”
Ok, then what about the other passage? It is very similar to the admonition to be silent during worship that Paul gave to the Corinthians, but then there is this additional sentence: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man.”
Let’s recall Priscilla, who, along with her husband Aquila, pulled Apollos aside to teach him matters of theology. And Junia, who was “prominent among the apostles.” And all of those house church leaders, who, you know, *led* churches that had both women and men in them. We know that women were leaders in the church! So what could this mean: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man.”?
Well, this letter is written to Timothy, who was working with the church at Ephesus. And one thing that is important to know about Ephesus at that time—it had a large temple to the goddess Artemis, and the worship of Artemis was run entirely by women. Women were in charge of everything, and they told the men what they could and could not do.
So, it’s possible that the concern here is to not allow the female-dominated worship of Artemis to influence the style of worship within the Christian church. This is further supported by the fact that the Greek word that is here translated as “have authority” actually means more like “to domineer” or “have abusive authority over.”
So, maybe it’s not that women are not to “have authority” over men, but that they are not to be *abusive* or controlling of their fellow men in Christian worship, like was happening in the worship of Artemis on the other end of town.
Maybe—the idea is that neither men nor women should abuse the power that they have found in Christ. Maybe one gender should not be placed as the authority, and one gender be subordinate. Maybe, it’s that all of us are given gifts that are equally valued among the congregation, and those gifts are given by God indiscriminately both to women and to men.
———
So, when we unpack the context of these two pairs of verses, we start to see that maybe they don’t mean what they seem to mean when they are pulled entirely out of their context.
The truth is that anyone can pluck a verse or two out of context from the Bible to support any position they want. People have used careully selected Bible verses to justify: enslaving other humans, genocide, racial segregation, domestic partner abuse, child abuse, authoritarianism, and violence against LGBTQ+ folks, among other atrocities.
It’s relatively easy to justify whatever bigotry or prejudice or hatefulness you want by plucking a verse or two from the Bible, divorcing it from it’s context, and shoving it down people’s throats. It’s easy, but of course, it isn’t right.
I wish I didn’t have to say this, but the Bible is not a weapon to be wielded against our perceived enemies, and it is not a crutch to support our tightly held prejudices.
What the Bible is: a God-inspired source of comfort and consolation, a record of how people across many lands and ages have understood who God is and how God works in the world, a revelation of who Jesus is and how we can know God through his words and his person.
If we think of the Holy Spirit as the spark, then the Bible is the tinder that lights the flame of our holy imaginations, as we envision what the world could be, and how we could work together to bring the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven. The Bible is all these things and more!
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I made the plan to do this whole series on women leaders in the New Testament a couple of months ago, finishing today with these two passages that have been used to keep women in a subordinate position in the church.
But coincidentally, this very week the Southern Baptist Convention is having their annual meeting. And they will be voting on a resolution to require all Southern Baptist Churches to prohibit women from the role of pastor, specifically in preaching to the congregation.
I don’t think it will pass (similar resolutions have failed twice already in previous years), but we will see. But the truth is that the idea that women should be silent in church is still alive and well.
What I hope is that all the little girls—and the little boys, too, because they need to hear it just as much as the girls do—I hope and pray that all the children sitting in those churches hear another perspective on this issue some day, and I hope they experience the expansive view that is out there that each of us, regardless of our biological makeup or our gender expression, is gifted by God, and each of us is cherished as co-workers in the gospel of Christ.
Because we are not in the business of exclusion and of keeping anyone “in their place.” Let’s never forget that in here, in this messy and sometimes broken place that is the Church, we are in the business of doing what Christ did: which is seeing and valuing and loving people for who they are—no matter what they look like, or where they fit in society.
And that is good news indeed.
Thanks be to God!